I can’t remember it very well, but you’re supposed to run if it’s hungry and play dead if it’s not, and you tell by either asking it politely or listening carefully for ursine belly rumblings. From what I can gather, most people who get attacked by a bear are extremely fortunate if they escape with horrific injuries. These things live a just a few hundred yards into the woods surrounding our work sites and town.

Is a Volkswagen Beetle to volume what Wales is to area?

Volume used to be measured in double-decker London buses until the bendy ones replaced them. That’s ZaNuLab’s Britain for you. Next thing you know, they’ll replace the traditional English football pitch as the standard unit of length with the Eiffel Tower.

“GI Hippos versus Nazi Sharks in the Ancient Land of the Pyramids” would probably be the ultimate Discovery Channel documentary sequence.

If you’re attacked by a tiger, you must never, ever run. Run and you die. The best thing to do is to stand tall and raise your arms up high and scream at the tiger, in an attempt to persuade it that you are more dangerous than it. It’s all very well reading that at home, isn’t it, but, faced with the tiger, would you? I suspect I’d have a nagging sensation of “Was that genuine good advice or a hoax? I bet running does work.”

Don’t be—running away is probably easy…

Hmm. From this handy “Travel Safety—Crocodiles” Webpage:

Advice if a gator/croc attacks you:

- run away in a straight line. Crocs and alligators will outrun you for about thirty foot [10m] or so [up to 20mph] after which they will need a bit of a lie down. They will outswim you all day long.

Of course, if you’re there with me, Paulie, all I have to do is outrun you.

Other useful snippets from that page:

if it has grabbed you:

- hit it repeatedly on its relatively sensitive nose, poke it in the eyes and scream. Gators don’t like resistance. A woman in north Australia fought off a crocodile attack with a bag of mussels she had just collected [Nov ‘03].

- don’t try to pry the jaws open. You won’t be able to.

- play dead. They stop shaking their prey when they think that it’s dead, wedging the body in their pantry for later consumption. This is when you escape. Hopefully.

Once the prey is bitten and firmly held the croc rolls its body over and over - the Death Spin/Roll. On land this is fairly slow but in the water it’s more like the speed of a tumble dryer. The result is that the prey becomes totally disoriented.
If the part held by the reptile is a limb there is a good chance of dislocation or complete severance. The rolling continues until the prey is dead by drowning or blood loss.
The death roll is effective and works on quite large animals

Apparently African crocs are more aggressive, but they’re smaller so you should concentrate on avoiding the hippos because they’re more dangerous, even though they…

…are easy to see and don’t deliberately hide.

There you go. Don’t let anyone tell you PooterGeek isn’t educational: Hippos are easy to see and don’t deliberately hide—presumably because the adults are the size of Volkswagen Beetles and there’s nothing bigger than they are for them to hide from (except perhaps humans with guns driving Land Rovers the size of Land Rovers).